When it comes to out-conspiracizing his GOP competitors, Allen West is the master. The former Florida congressman’s latest triumph in the endless race for “Wildest Rant Against the Democrats” came Monday, when he suggested in a blog post that there was a dark connection between Benghazi and Boko Haram: The Obama team was focusing on the kidnapped Nigerian girls in order to divert attention from the congressional probe, West wrote. “Are we witnessing an Obama ‘Wag the Dog’ moment with Boko Haram in Nigeria? I say yes.”

The odd thing is, in ways that West probably didn’t figure, there are very likely real links between the Obama administration’s handling of Boko Haram, the Nigerian terrorist group, and the violent extremists behind the Benghazi tragedy.

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According to current and former U.S. officials, the reluctance of Hillary Clinton’s State Department to designate Boko Haram as a foreign terrorist organization in the summer of 2012 was no isolated case; it was partly rooted in a larger effort by the Obama administration to narrowly define al Qaeda and deemphasize the rise of its new affiliates, especially in Africa.

The administration displayed a similar attitude toward Libya around the time of its Boko Haram decision, when it underestimated the rise of the violent Islamist groups there—these are the conclusions of Clinton’s own review panel—in the months before U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi.

Coincidentally or not, this tendency to ignore, sidestep or minimize the violent actions of groups such as Boko Haram and the Islamist militias in Benghazi served to bolster the president’s case during his re-election campaign that he had largely defeated al Qaeda, or, as his administration sometimes neglected to clarify, at least the “core” group that attacked the United States on 9/11.

Now here’s a complicated thought: This does not mean there was any cover-up of what really happened in Benghazi, as Republican critics are alleging anew, or that it was necessarily wrong to keep Boko Haram – which provoked international outrage last week when it kidnapped more than 200 Nigerian schoolgirls – off the list of foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) at the time the decision was made. Johnnie Carson, the former assistant secretary of state for Africa, and other senior officials argued then that there was little evidence of any relationship between the fractious and ill-defined Boko Haram group and al Qaeda, and the Nigerian terrorists appeared to have no goals apart from ousting the Nigerian government and bringing Islamist rule to the country. Although the debate inside the administration was intense and passionate, the White House and State Department ultimately decided that Boko Haram’s links to al Qaeda groups were “very, very thin,” a former senior administration official told me. Even today, he added: “There remains almost no evidence of that.”

Carson was said to be the chief advocate of this point of view, and yet he and other State and White House officials were in the minority when it came to that assessment, officials involved in the debate said. As early as January 2012, Lisa Monaco, then-head of the Justice Department’s national security division and now White House counterterrorism coordinator, sent a letter to State Department counterterrorism chief Daniel Benjamin contending that Boko Haram had links with “transnational terrorist groups,” including al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, an affiliate of al Qaeda in north Africa, and saying that the Nigerian group “openly espoused violence against the West,” Reuters reported. In late June of that year U.S. Africa commander Gen. Carter Ham said that the linkages between Boko Haram and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb “are probably the most worrisome in terms of the indications we have that they are likely sharing funds, training and explosive materials that can be quite dangerous.”

So why did the cautious Carson win that argument? One U.S. counterterrorism official familiar with the discussions says there was a “real reluctance” to expand the war against al Qaeda to “other parts of the world, especially Africa, and a desire to avoid mission creep.” He said: “Sure, these guys [Boko Haram] are monsters, but they were Nigeria’s monsters. They weren’t our monsters.”

The Boko Haram decision, this official and others involved in the debate say, came at a time when the president was genuinely worried that the war against al Qaeda and its affiliates had become too broad and ill-defined, even in violence-wracked places like Yemen, Pakistan and Afghanistan. The administration was especially determined not to let the fight spread too far into Africa, although the United States had already set up an Africa Command. “There was a sense that we have to be a lot more deliberative about everyone who pops up as an Islamist,” this official said. “Certainly there was a reluctance to make international terrorists out of people who weren’t international terrorists.”

It was in this super-stringent context that the administration approached Boko Haram and the various Islamist threats emerging in northern Africa, including the groups ultimately responsible for the Benghazi attack. This attitude was reflected broadly in speeches by Obama warning that America must get off a “perpetual wartime footing,” and declaring that “core al Qaeda is a shell of its former self.” In a landmark speech at National Defense University last year, Obama said, “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.… Unless we discipline our thinking, our definitions, our actions, we may be drawn into more wars we don’t need to fight.”

That’s Obama’s counterterrorism philosophy in a nutshell, and it helps explain the administration’s effort to blame the Benghazi violence mainly on widespread protests against a video lampooning the Prophet Mohammad rather than “a failure of policy,” as Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes put it in his recently released and controversial memo. It has also given rise to Republican charges, unsubstantiated though they remain, that the administration covered up what it knew about the Benghazi attackers to further the president’s case that he was defeating al Qaeda.

In a telephone interview over the weekend, Carson gave me a window into why he opposed designating Boko Haram.